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Berkeley Square Bookstore.
Berkeley Square Bookstore was considered to be one of the most haunted buildings in London, aside from the Tower, which made it an ideal place for government officials to secretly test new recruits for the newly reformed Shades division. The first, and so far only known one so far, has been Stephen Dene. The place was a four-story house with a slate-gray front which, in this series, belonged to Alexandria's family before it was bought by the British PM and went through several different owners before it was converted into an antique bookstore. The reception area was a long, narrow room divided in half by a staircase. The rest of the space was crowded by bookshelves precisely filled with volumes in good condition, many of them behind glass. There were two rooms radiating off the reception area, which were also full of books. By the staircase, there was a very fine and elegant desk with a green-shaded lamp on it. There was a roll of Oriental carpet on the staircase, with metal bars pinching the carpet at the folds to keep it from coming loose. Pictures of Georgian scenes and ducks and hunting dogs lined the steps up to the second floor, which only had one window at its far end, and the electricity didn't work. Books, chairs, and bookcases filled all the rooms. The third floor was much like the second one, except for a smell of burning flesh that came and went as one climbed up. This floor, though not structurally different from the other three, was more shaded. There were heavy curtains drawn across the window at the top of the stairwell. There was wallpaper on this floor, a messy, flocked pattern that seemed different from the tasteful decorative scheme of the lower part of the shop. The wallpaper was surprisingly cold and wet to the touch. The top floor seemed almost entirely disused, and it was surprisingly cold. There were crates of books around, mostly at the top of the stairwell, as if someone had thrown them there. The doors were all closed. The first room up there, likely a servant's quarters back in Victorian times, was small, cramped, and filled with folded up cardboard boxes, split books, and a few chairs with shredded stuffing. The second room, Alexandria's most likely, had an adjoining door to the first. It had a fireplace with scorch marks around it by the connecting wall, and a shared chimney. The room had delicate pink-pattered wallpaper which looked both old and fresh. There was nothing inside the room but more boxes, and an old metal bed frame. The third room faced the square, and actually got some light at night. The wallpaper was yellow, and the chairs inside were broken. There were no boxes. Dr. Marigold told Stephen that eight people who stayed in the upper room of the bookshop overnight had been reported to have gone mad with fright. Trivia The claim of eight people going insane after staying the night upstairs, is both unsubstantiated and inaccurate, since only two or three people at most went mad in the house, Thomas Mayers, one of the owners of the house, a maid who was found in the attic, completely mad, who was committed to an asylum and died there a day later, and the story of a young man who was said to have been locked up in the same attic until he went mad and died there. But this is fiction. The extra people could have been Shades. The three people who died in the house were Sir Robert Warboys, Edward Blunden, and an unknown skeptical man who said he didn't believe in ghosts. Alexandria is probably based on the story of the ghost of a little girl who was killed in the attic by a sadistic servant. Category:The Boy in the Smoke Category:Locations Category:Real life